Well, I feel like I ought to comment on things...so a whole lot of comments, secret-tagged for the sake of space, and unhide-tagged until one-week-one-day from now, give or take.
(Incidentally: I submitted two puzzles. I also gave two puzzles a "
10"
--but I gave one of my own puzzles an 8.)
A few overall opinions on the nature of "
puzzle"
: a good puzzle should have a single answer; the answer should be obviously right, when it's reached; it should be possible for a solver to reach that answer. Some of these puzzles, I felt, suffered from a lack of knowing when you got to the right answer; some of them, while they led to a clear final answer, involved leaps of logic a solver couldn't reasonably be expected to make.
Just my opinions; your mileage may vary.
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#1: Valid, but somewhat underhanded, I felt.
#2: Sure looks impressive--though I had no idea how.
#3: Thoroughly incomprehensible to me, I'm afraid.
#4: I really liked the "Sicilian" and "on the line" parts, but I felt the "yellow Corvette = Death" was somewhat too arcane. (Not "too arcane to be hermetic"; just "too arcane to expect people to get".) I think some indication of what's being looked for (i.e. "famous movie quote") would have helped make it more tractable.
#5: It's...I thought it was sort of lacking something. Self-reference is fine, but this was a little too vague in its self-reference for my tastes.
#6: Much too vague. "Don't" didn't indicate "opposite" to me; my first thought was "...panic", which is my main association with "don't" and buttons. This puzzle also lacked the aforementioned "when you get the answer, you know it's right" quality; if I thought, "hm...pull?" I wouldn't have any reason to believe I was right and didn't need to keep thinking.
#7: One of mine. I hope people liked it.
#8: Excellent! The large tic-tac-toe board tells you how to interpret the little ones; the blanks in the center help confirm that you're on the right track, because you're either forming words or you're doing something wrong; and the final "on a phone" was nicely thematic to both the tic-tac-toe symbol and the 1-9 numbering. This was my other '10' vote.
#9: Solid, but also a familiar puzzle type.
#10: Of all the variations on this theme (e.g. #5, #22) I liked this one the best. I'm not sure I can even say why.
#11: A fascinating problem--but wholly intractable to the non-genius-level mathematician.
#12: Not too bad--a nice variation on the purely-base-10 A=1 encoding.
#13: Mine. Again, I hope people liked it (they seem to have, so far). If anyone's curious to see the Python script that helped me break strings of letters into possible chemical symbols, let me know.
#14: Fair enough, but also semi-familiar from not-pr0n-like games.
#15: Also fair enough--but Cute GIF Tricks started to lose their appeal (see #14).
#16: I may not have given this a fair enough shot; its difficulty level was a little off-putting.
#17: Not bad per se, but a little bit mechanical.
#18: Mmmm; straightforward trivia, not my favorite.
#19: I think I see what was going on here, but--a little baroque.
#20: Also a little baroque and disjoint.
#21: I liked this one, more than most of the explain-the-DROD-room puzzles. I couldn't solve it, but when I looked at the answer, I said, "Yes, that makes perfect sense, and I should have seen it."
#22: More silly GIF tricks, I fear.
#23: This one made little sense to me, I'm afraid. I see what the author was getting at, but "each iteration" didn't mean, to me, that Beethro had to survive iteration n to get to n+1; it looked like it just meant "how many roaches total?".
#24: A valiant effort, and I love the idea of retrograde analysis DROD. It's a shame that there are so many variables that this one ended up so contested.
#25: A nice little "how well do you know your monster-movement-order?" puzzle, I thought.
#26: My only '1' vote, I'm afraid; as I explained in the other thread, I felt that submitting a puzzle not of one's own creation was strongly against the spirit of the contest.
#27: As I haven't played JtRH yet, I found this one unsolvable (which is a shame).
#28: I had trouble following the analysis, but again, I liked the concept.
#29: I must be missing something, if the author says that this would be "otherwise tedious"--if the method is to move, pixel-by-pixel, in the order described, that sounds incredibly tedious to me, "shortcuts" or no.
#30: Interesting in concept, but--you know, anything that begins "mirror the image left to right" is off to a bad start, IMHO. (Why would I think to mirror it? Why not present it in the correct orientation to start?) And as we learned in the MIT Mystery Hunt this year, equation cryptograms are incredibly hard to solve. So it's objectively well-constructed, but from a solver's point of view, I can't say I liked it.
#31: Wow: speaking of baroque! This isn't necessarily a bad idea for a puzzle, but I think it's way too much information to fit into 300x300 pixels. There are a number of notable leaps in logic here-e.g. that the thing in the northwest corner should be converted to numbers.
#32: Well, kind of straightforward, but then, that was sort of nice after the complications of some of the others...
#33: Also kind of straightforward.
(Sorry about other holidays.)
